Apple's new Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro might have a hardware fault. It seems that new owners of the MacBook Pro 2011 has been experiencing freezes. The problem seems to be the Sandy Bridge processors and Radeon HD discrete graphics are freezing under heavy loads.
Users may experience their MacBook Pro's fans revved up and cursors getting stuck during multitasking. Complaints comes from over a 40-page discussion thread in the Apple Support forums. The thread has gotten long enough that there is now a "MBP-Freeze" wiki page giving out symptoms and possible fixes.
A workaround to fix this problem is to download the program gfxCardStatus, this will disable the MacBook Pro's discrete Radeon HD GPU. Your system should work but will only rely on the integrated graphics component of its Sandy Bridge CPU.
Link to the gfxCardStatus can be found here:
http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus
